Exam Blog : Biology Preparation for KVPY (SA)

Note: This was formerly a post I made on a FIITJEE online student community called myPAT. I'm reposting it here, almost verbatim, for posterity (in the bold assumption that this blog will be read in the future)

I have now seen many questions in this community asking for strategies and books for Biology preparation for KVPY. As I faced a similar dilemma during my preparation days, I am sharing what I know (I have cleared both stages of SA, so what worked for me might work for you as well.)

First things first; since this community consists mainly of students preparing for JEE, chances are that you wish to study Bio only for clearing KVPY (if there are people who really enjoy biology, please tell me. It'll be a post for another day).

Well, I explain the exam-oriented approach in the following points;

1. First get yourself all the previous years' papers (they are available on the FIITJEE site, or you could purchase the archive by Arihant publications or any other source; I had the Arihant one since its answers are mostly reliable, but you could get any other book.)
2. Now take each paper, a rough sheet, and the NCERT Books. In topic-wise format, mark from which topic a particular question was asked ( this is an extremely helpful exercise. First, you get an overview of the types of questions, & also the depth and scale of the coverage. If you can't make out from which topic a particular question is from, skim through NCERT and find out. You can do this exercise with a friend, as I did because it will save you time).
3. Do the above-mentioned exercise genuinely. You'll get a very precise idea of what to cover and what to possibly skip ( cheatsheet: Genetics, Heredity, and DNA are a must. Biotechnology is skippable)
4. Now that you have an idea of what to cover, now comes the actual studying. The main books to rely on are NCERTs of both grades. NCERTs of BIO are good; they are almost as good as the NCERTs of IOC. I, and my friend, both mainly relied on NCERTs, and that's enough ( I used some other books too, but that is not a general strategy. As I said, it's a post for another day.)
5. The million dollar question; how to actually study it? There are actually two approaches; one that I followed, and another one that my friend did ( this friend that I mention throughout also qualified both stages, so if you are gonna rely on my advice, then you could as surely pay heed to what he did)
6. Approach 1: This is a study-heavy approach, mainly because I enjoy reading Biology. What I did was first identify the major portions ( as I have already mentioned). Next, I started with the 12th Bio chapters ( since I had already covered some portions of 11th for school exams and NTSE Stage 2, I had to mainly focus on 12th). So what I did was that I started making what I called 'KVPY SA: OBJECTIVE NOTES FOR BIOLOGY'. This was the actual title of the copy that I made (It is in front of me right now). What I did was that I made notes of everything acutely conceptual and fact-based, like what I'd seen in the previous years' papers. For these notes, I used NCERT, a FIITJEE study package of NTSE Stage 2, and an amazing book on NEET Biology called Trueman's Elementary Biology ( authors Bhatia and Tyagi). I made notes, remembered the facts and understood the concepts, and re-read what I did not understand. After doing this the archive questions were mostly covered.
7. Approach 2: My friend followed this approach. It is a much more focused approach. He read both the NCERT books (majorly 11th), covering mostly the important questions. Along with this, he made a list of the definitions. He also made a list of keywords for each chapter, on a separate page, and kept referring to them and remembering the associated concepts. For the things that he did not understand, he took some help from his sister (who is in medical college).

The concept of buffer subjects/topics: 

The syllabus for KVPY SA is very vast, and practically no average student can cover the entire syllabus of each topic (the syllabus is not very well defined, but expect questions from almost all topics of 11th and 12th). Now since you cannot cover the entire syllabus, you should do some topics as a buffer: meaning that you know the bare basics of the topic, but you don't expect to be able to do many questions from it. On exam day, if you are unable to tackle some questions from a topic that you prepared, you could try and attempt questions from these buffer topics, and hope to score reasonably well. These topics act as a safety net, so that if you've read even their basics, even then you might apply the concepts to prevent any disaster ( I hope you understand what I mean).

Taking the example of me and my friend, we both had the exact opposite 'buffer topics'; While he'd prepared O. Chem better, it was my 'buffer' topic. On the other hand, I'd prepared portions from 12th Bio, while those were his 'buffers'.

I know that this may sound incredible, but we'd never planned it; it just so happened. In fact, when you start preparing, you'd realize which topics you are not entirely comfortable with, at least at that point in time; these topics will serve you as a buffer.

Also, this is the list of books:

1. NCERT 11th: Compulsory
2. NCERT 12th: Compulsory
3. Trueman's Elementary Biology, Vol. 1 (11th) : Optional ( approach-dependent)
4. Trueman's Elementary Biology, Vol. 2 (12th) : Optional ( approach-dependent)
5. Trueman's Objective Biology [ I haven't used this book personally, but many of my PCB friends refer to this book because it has more concise theory]
6. S. Chand, Pradeep's, GRB: I don't use these books, but they are used a lot by school teachers.

 

I think I did my best to give a walkthrough of KVPY SA BIO prep. If you have any doubts, please ask them in the comments. ∎

AB